Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

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About

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a questionnaire designed to assess one's psychological preferences and in accordance to a group of 16 distinct classifications of personalities an individual may exhibit. On the web, the MBTI is often used as a template for personality questionnaires in the realm of fandoms, in a similar vein to "which character are you?" tests.

Origin

The Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assessment is a psychometric questionnaire designed to measure psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions. The framework was developed by American psychologists Katherine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, based on theories proposed by renowned psychologist Carl Jung, during the World War II in the 1940s^[1], with the belief a knowledge of personality preferences would help women who were entering the industrial workforce, and it was published in 1962.

The earliest known resource website for the MBTI was created in 1998 under the domain personalitypage.com,^[7] which remains active as of January 2015. One of the first notable online commentaries on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator can be found in a blog post by Canadian journalist and author Malcolm Gladwell on September, 2004, in which he criticized the M.B.T.I. for having "a large problem with consistency" and that its founders "did not actually understand Jung at all"^[2].

Spread

On June 14th, 2006, a blogger named Peter shared a career-oriented version of the MBTI chart in a post titled 'Myers-Briggs typology: I’m an ENFP' on his personal website.^[3] In the post, the blogger described the MBTI as more or less a more credible form of astrology and presented an image of the MBTI chart that showed female actresses that befit their assumpted personality type.

On April 6th, 2013, the blog A Little Bit of Personality was created. The blog is currently active and is dedicated to the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator, often posting summaries and explanations to how fictional characters are apt to belong to one personality type or another^[4].

On Tumblr^[6], the tag #mbti chart yields a wide variety of custom MBTI charts repurposed as fandom questionnaires.

Criticism

Albeit popular, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator has been proven by professional statisticians and psychologists to be highly unreliable. The negative criticism against the MBTI has been sustained by evidence for over three decades^[5]. Some researchers have interpreted the reliability of the test to be low. Studies have found that between 39% and 76% of those tested fall into different types upon retesting some weeks or years later^[1]. A second criticism is that the MBTI mistakenly assumes that personality falls into mutually exclusive categories. You are either an extrovert or an introvert, but never a mix of the two. Yet most people fall somewhere in the middle. According to psychologist David Pittenger, caution is advised when using the MBTI for professional purposes. Furthermore, Pittenger believe that its success is due to “the beguiling nature of the horoscope-like summaries of personality and steady marketing.”^[5]